Ocean Garbage Patch Breeds Bugs

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The great Pacific garage patch is giving sea striders a place to
breed out on the open ocean, changing the natural environment
there, new research suggests.

The great Pacific garbage patch, known to scientists as the
North Pacific Subtropial Gyre, is a large patch of mulched up
plastic and other garbage, often said to be the size of Texas,
floating in the Pacific Ocean.

"This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a
relatively short time period and the effect it's having on a
common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate," study researcher Miriam
Goldstein, graduate student at the University of California San
Diego, said in a statement. "We're seeing changes in this marine
insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic."

The sea strider, Halobates sericeus, is related to
pond striders seen in freshwater lakes. It usually lays its
eggs on floating objects in the ocean, like seashells, seabird
feathers, tar lumps and pumice. The researchers compared recently
collected plastic to that collected in 1972 under a microscope.

They found that the number of pieces of plastic less than 0.2
inches (5 millimeters) in diameter increased about 100 times over
the past 40 years. They also found that these tiny plastic pieces
gave sea striders more room to lay their eggs, leading to much
higher densities of the invertebrate in
the garbage patch.

By giving these insects a place to breed out on the open ocean,
the plastic patch is changing the natural environment and could
be having an impact on the local food web, the researchers said.
This is exactly what they've been worried about, Goldstein said.
[ Video: Humans Hit the
Oceans Hard ]

"It's a general pattern throughout the ocean that the animals
that live on hard surfaces are different than the animals that
live on soft surfaces, or in the water column. All this plastic
has added a lot of hard surfaces to an ecosystem that
historically has very few," Goldstein told LiveScience in an
email.

This could be a "good" thing for the insect's main predator,
crabs, increasing their numbers — but such a large change could
disrupt the oceanic food web, the researchers said. And the
items that the insect eats, including tiny animals like
zooplankton and fish eggs, could take a big population hit.

The garbage patch community seems to have a very low amount of
biodiversity, Goldstein said, which isn't a great thing: "We're
concerned that this might change the flow of energy in this
ecosystem, potentially favoring the low-biodiversity rafting
community at the expense of the high-biodiversity water column
community."